Re: In addition to INS and DEL elements: UPD(ated)

Aymeric Poulain Maubant <Aymeric.PoulainMaubant@enst-bretagne.fr> 
  wrote:

> In addition to INS, DEL and the hypothetical DATED, can I put back
> on this list what I posted one month ago ?

> INS and DEL are very good ideas, indeed. But changes in a document
> cannot simply mean inserting or deleting text. What about a UPD
> (for update) element with the same semantics than INS and DEL ?
> UPD would indicates sections of text which were not totally inserted
> nor deleted ; in a word, simply updated.

Hm. Perhaps a 'datetime' attribute can be added to SPAN to indicate 
that?

  <SPAN DATETIME="96-12-01" TITLE="Changed">...</SPAN>

Technically for 'legal' documents you can use INS and DEL 
combined instead of an UPDated tag:

  <P>The next meeting is <DEL DATETIME="1997-01-31">Jan. 30</DEL>
   <INS DATETIME="1997-02-12">Feb. 12</INS></P>

But this can get messy, yes. And won't work with older browsers.
Unless you want to flag the change for readers of the page, using
comments is a better idea in my opinion. And if you do want readers
to see a visiual notation, a variation on DATED using just the
'begin' (or 'datetime') attribute to note when it was changed is
better.

Or perhaps a more general element called <ANNOTE> (I think <NOTE> and 
<FN> are used from previous proposals, even if not widely deployed). 
One could have a 'datetime' attribute to indicate changes, a 'cite' 
for further information on why it is annoted, and perhaps a 'type' 
attribute to indicate other types of annotations, footnotes or notes, 
etc.

Rob

 
---
Robert Rothenburg Walking-Owl (wlkngowl@unix.asb.com)
(Se habla PGP.) http://www.wusb.org/mutant/

Received on Thursday, 21 August 1997 17:08:50 UTC